Sometimes, marketers often get mixed up between content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO); they may look similar but in they are in fact, way much different.

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In Terms of Objective,

Search engine optimisation aims to make the website on the first page of Google in terms of organic search volume. With the constant change in search engine algorithm, it is often not easy for websites today, to get onto the first page of the search engines without having a good amount of quality articles that are relevant to the consumers.

This is because Google has now been looking at brands that are authority in their topics.

Therefore, a website with a well archived of consumer relevant content and expert opinion articles is more important now. Content marketing hence has become a key factor in making the website more prominent on Google as well as other search engines in the longer run.

The objective of content marketing aims to educate consumers and support their buying decision with relevant articles that are of interest to them. Though it has a complete different objective to search engine optimisation, this strategy would be more in-line to rank on Google first page eventually, no matter how many times Google changes its algorithm.

In Terms of Consumers Decision,

As mentioned earlier, content marketing works on influencing the consumers’ decision by educating them more about the benefits of the products and services or about the interesting topics that are related to them. Before making the buying decision, the consumer has to look for more information about the brand and its products first in order to understand what they are going to buy. Therefore, content marketing works perfectly in this way.

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Search engine optimisation may not work on influencing consumers’ decision as its purpose is to get the website on the first page of the search engine as fast as possible rather than orchestrating its content to influence the consumers.

In Terms of Presentation,

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One SEO strategy is to add as many keyword based articles on the website as possible. Therefore, one may argue that this strategy is quite similar to content marketing. But this may not be correct because content marketing is more about presentation, it is about how we present our articles in order to attract the consumers to our brands. Think of your brand like a magazine publisher which has to produce tons of articles that are engaging, thought-provoking and especially interesting to your customers (readers).

SEO, on the other hand, focuses more on embedding the keywords into the articles than producing the right content that the consumers may like in order for them to buy the brand’s products and services in the future.

In a nutshell,

Content marketing does help in getting the website better ranked on search engines in the longer run, and on top of that, it also plays an important role in influencing consumer buying decision.So, content marketing and search engine optimisation are two completely different strategies.